How Keir Starmer's polling encourages both change and paralysis
Welcome to the 199th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which this week takes a look at how Keir Starmer’s polling compares with that for the Labour Party, kicking off with some good news for the Prime Minister.
This is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intentions polls, seat projections from MRPs, and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polling and analysis, including:
Why YouGov tends to put Reform support lower than other pollsters;
Views on digital ID; and
Whether the public thinks the defectors to Reform will help or hinder the Conservatives.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now:
For more polling news as it comes in during the week, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
One last preliminary - and it’s nothing to do with polling - I may have found the most inaccurate page on the internet.
And with that, on with the show.
Is the problem Starmer, Labour or both?
The good news for the Prime Minister
Back in October The Guardian reported that:
Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.
But good news for the PM: when YouGov put this to the test in January they found otherwise:
A new YouGov polling experiment tests whether attaching politicians’ names to a policy impacts its support among the wider public. Respondents were asked about two popular policies to see whether being linked to Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage boosts or sinks this support.
The verdict?
The British public overall were not less likely to support two popular policies when Keir Starmer’s name was attached to them
They were, however, somewhat less likely to do so if told Nigel Farage reportedly backed them.
The bad news for the Prime Minister
Other polling, however, rapidly brings another type of news, such as this striking data from Ipsos showing Keir Starmer polling worse than Liz Truss:
But of course the popularity of leaders and their parties are linked: this gloom might be about Starmer, or it might be about Labour in general.
Among 2024 Labour voters, Starmer has only a slim three-point lead (40%-37%) on whether he should remain as Labour leader and Prime Minister or whether he should be replaced as both. The overall public verdict is strongly against him: 50% for replacement, 24% for him to remain.
A key question in interpreting such results is the extent to which such figures are a reflection of the PM personally and the extent to which they are a reflection of their party. Which is why I periodically compare leader and party ratings.
The latest Ipsos Political Monitor asked people both whether they liked each party leader and whether they liked their party. We can therefore compare each leader with their party. I have taken the leader’s ‘like’ score and subtracted their party’s ‘like’ score to see what premium or deficit they score:
Ed Davey: +3
Zack Polanski: +3
Kemi Badenoch: +3
Nigel Farage: -4
Keir Starmer: -14
A similar calculation for just Starmer and Badenoch can be done with the latest More in Common poll, comparing the ‘good job’ rating for the person with their party:
Kemi Badenoch: +6
Keir Starmer: -1
Better than the Ipsos data, but still a long way from supporting an argument that things are better for Labour with Starmer in charge.
The mixed news for the Prime Minister
The latest polling of Labour Party members by Survation for LabourList shows that Starmer would prevail in a member ballot against some, but not all, of his rivals:
(Remember though that Labour leadership contests are not restricted to party members alone. Affiliated supporters also get a vote as per page 29 of the Labour Party Rule Book.)1
And yet…
As I pointed out when writing about Andy Burnham’s poll data, even Burnham, the Labour figure who does best in such polling, also does (just) worse in head-to-heads with Nigel Farage than Keir Starmer. Moreover, the hypothetical five point poll bounce in voting intentions for Labour under Burnham rather than Starmer, even when taken at face value, is only five points, a long way short of repairing the damage to Labour’s standing since the general election.
Hence my conclusion then that the data “suggests that personality change from Starmer to Burnham on its own is unlikely to be enough for Labour. Of course, as John Major illustrated with the Poll Tax, personality change can open the path to policy change too.”
To flip that around, while the data above has some (relatively) bright spots for Starmer, they glimmer only faintly, swallowed by the gloom across the polling landscape.
Starmer supporters can make a decent case that the data does not suggest switching the leader would suddenly fix things for Labour. The question that leaves hanging, which polling data can’t answer, is whether the changes necessary therefore can come without a change of leader or whether that is a necessary prerequisite.
In that sense, perhaps the polling picture for Labour is the worst of all worlds: enough to show that something needs to happen but not enough to show that any particular thing would work. It encourages both change and paralysis.
Elsewhere from me…
The National Audit Office warned of problems. The Public Accounts Committee warned of problems. The Cabinet Office knew there were problems. So why did the Cabinet Office go ahead with the change of civil service pension administrator which has turned into a disaster?
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a 12-month free subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify rather than grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation, with my decision being final. Messages about both of those are always very welcome, though.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
As I’ve commented a couple of times recently, the Conservatives’ inching up in the polls seems to have overall stalled, while it also now looks reasonably clear that Reform’s slip in the polls has bottomed out. It is all rather static out there in the samples.
The table is also online here. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next, the latest seat projections from MRPs and similar models, also sorted by fieldwork dates. As these are infrequent, note how old some of the ‘latest’ data is.
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name. It is worth noting that Kemi Badenoch’s ratings have improved and it’s not uncommon now for her ratings to be better than those of Nigel Farage.
The table is also online here with additional details, and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historic figures for both voting intention and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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Public disagrees with traditionalist voices over Parliamentary refurbishment, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
The Houses of Parliament are, literally, falling apart. Should refurbishment involve one or both Houses moving out during it, or should it take place around them? The former is cheaper and quicker while traditionalist voices prefer keeping at least the Commons going in one of the chambers on site. The public,
